Our emotional family

"I miss you
Like the deserts miss the rain."

-- Missing, Everything But the Girl



Tom and his kids came over for dinner tonight... the kids played and we ate and Tom and I sat and shot the shit and it felt like I had an old friend over.

It's hard to believe sometimes that we've only been dating for a few months.

I have to remember that when he loads my dishwasher all wrong and my OCD kicks in.

Everyone had lots of homework, so we had to part at a respectable hour. Zoe is normally upset when we all have to leave, and tonight was no different. Except that she seemed to get unusually withdrawn. I have understood her objection to her playmates leaving, or the fact that it's actually time to get down to the business of the nighttime ritual, but tonight she was particularly forlorn. She paced around and then started bawling before I even told her it was time to apply soap to her skin.

I was sitting on the living room floor with Jacob when her crying began. And I recognized that cry.

And it all came flooding back: The night Joe told me to leave, one of the few times he had the guts to actually say it to my face instead of over the phone or through email. One of the nights we were going to bed and he hadn't spoken to me for a week. The Night I went and sat on the steps and cried until I couldn't cry anymore and held my belly all full of Jacob and wished I might get even a little sick so I could be hospitalized and get away, get a relative to take care of Zoe and get her out of that mess.

And Joe just let me cry. Alone. Slept through it, probably.

Her cry tonight, that was my cry then. Sitting on the steps. Not knowing what was going to happen next. Desperate.

Normally I let her cry it out in her own way, or I try to distract her or otherwise nip it in the bud, but this time she crawled into my lap, shuddering, and Jacob climbed up and embraced us, and we just let her cry. And we held her tight. I know she hates when Jacob is not with us, and that this is an extension of that fear that the next night he won't be with us.

I don't know what is next. I didn't know what to tell her. Normally I have all the answers, but tonight, I just let her get it all out of her system. And we just loved her through it, held her and let her sob.

Because that's all I ever wanted.

That, and knowing what's next.